Beginning
The company was founded by Edward Ball in 1936 as part of the Alfred I. du Pont Testamentary Trust. The staunchly segregationist Ball was du Pont's brother-in-law and also affiliated with the Florida Democrat political group known as "The Pork Chop Gang".[16][17] Prior to the company's formal establishment, the trust had already begun land purchases in 1923.[18] During the land booms in South Florida, the company acquired still-cheap land in the Florida Panhandle. In 1933, du Pont purchased the Apalachicola Northern Railroad.
The Apalachicola Northern Railroad had extended its network from Chattahoochee to Port St. Joe, Florida, in 1910, hoping to take advantage of increased shipping trade through the Panama Canal. However, when the Great Depression hit, business dropped off significantly. Du Pont purchased the struggling railroad, and made plans to use the infrastructure to build a paper mill, leading to the foundation of the St. Joe Company.
Du Pont drew up elaborate plans for the development of his mill town as "The Model City of the South", but died before it could be completed. His brother-in-law, Ed Ball, took control of the St. Joe Company in 1935, but never acted on the master city plan.
Construction began in 1936, and from 1938 to 1996, the company operated a paper mill at Port St. Joe, as St. Joe Paper Company.[19] From 1938 to 1974 St. Joe Paper Company discharged mill wastewater into an unlined impoundment in the Highland View Neighborhood[20] and St. Joe Bay. Land purchases continued throughout the 1940s and 1950s, often for "mere dollars an acre,"[18] and St. Joe eventually owned more than one million acres (4,000 km2). The company invigorated the local economy following the Depression, employing thousands at its paper mill, but wreaked havoc on the environment. The mill released sulfurous exhaust from sulfate pulping and dioxins, an unintended toxin generated by the chlorine bleaching process used to make white pulp.
By the 1950s, the company was drawing 35 million gallons of water a day from the Floridan Aquifer, seriously depleting the water table. St Joe Paper also clear-cut millions of acres of old growth forest, engaging in silviculture to replant the areas with slash pine. The practice decimated the native longleaf pine stands, reducing the species to "2 percent of its former range." Because of this, the United States Department of the Interior designated parts of the region a Critically Endangered Ecosystem.[19]
The paper mill was most profitable in the 1960s, with products being directly marketed to company-owned box plants. However, an extended period of down time (9-months) due to market conditions in 1996 signaled the beginning of the end for the mill. After nearly sixty years, St. Joe decided to get out of the paper business. The mill was sold in 1996 to Florida Coast Paper for $390 million, and that company was able to operate and produce paper until the decline of the container board market. Florida Coast Paper closed the mill on August 16, 1998,[21] and did not reopen. The mill was gone by 2003.[22]
After the dismantling of the paper mill, the St. Joe Company was back in town in 2008 to unveil a $344 million plan for the former mill site that was similar to Alfred du Pont's idealized Southern town – an integrated city with upscale residential districts, entertainment venues, a thriving port, and a diverse economy. The State of Florida re-routed US 98 inland to permit development of beachfront property that would become the Windmark Beach community.[23]
